The earliest recognized futures trading exchange is the Dojima Rice Exchange, established in 1710 in Japan for the purpose of trading rice futures. ... The United States had the earliest official commodity trading exchange in the west, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), formed in 1848. And in 1848 - was there a paranoid independent spec trader who thought all of those floor brokers standing around the pit holding huge stacks of customer orders were conspiring against his one lot ?
Things are not always as they appear... An HFT will probe with a 1 lot because they don't want to run into a large iceberg with engines full speed ahead, but they are NOT 1 lot traders. I seriously doubt that retail 1 lot traders are probing to find out if the passive order they are hitting is a spoof or an iceberg. An iceberg will refresh in 1 lots or as needed as they don't want to show their size. We can see where an iceberg is, most of the time we can even see its size in a large amount of volume traded at a confined price level (stacking, delta, volume profiling). What we can't see is how large an iceberg is when it is at the HOD or LOD. Sometimes we can see that it was large enough to have all HFTs and larger speculators retreat which will show on a chart as a shooting star at the top or hammer at the bottom but these are very crude representations and require having the exact timeframe or period set on your charts. Your 1 lot is NOT equal to another's 1 lot.
I have never seen a 1 lot trade move the market. Theoretically every 1 lot can influence the market, but if there are 4587 lots sold instead of 4586, will that change the market ? No. Because that 1 lot represents only 0.02180549498% of the volume.
why wouldl you say theoretically ? um theoretically would be papertrading.. not live trading. If i buy at the mkt on a 1 lot and it jumps the gap(spread) then i have moved the marekt with a 1 lot. if i trigger stop losses with a mkt order 1 lot that trades above or belwo stop prices then I have movd the market. everytime a trade 1 or 100 goes into the mkt it moves the market especially when markets do not allow "LOCKED" markets.. Lastly if you think volume is constanthen you really do not understand microstructure either.. there are times even in the emini futures that you will see no contracts traded or a only a couple. There are way too many + and - factors based on order types in the market and cancels to even begin to explain exactly how far the mkt will move.
OK tell me after the close when I bought or sold eminis. As it would move the market accordingly to you. We will see how hard the market jumped higher or crashed. I never mentioned anything about volume being constant. Don't know where you found that.